Jamie's blog about software, startups, and swimming (and other things that don't alliterate).
Not enough software developers have understood the seismic change in the industry. That complex problem you’ve struggled with? That app idea you had? That trivial little utility you’ve always wanted but would have taken too much effort to build? That stupid game you thought of just a second ago as a joke? You can just build it! You don’t have to start a company. It’s not the beginning of an open…
There is little doubt in my mind that AI coding models have fundamentally changed the nature of software development in 2026. But is the SaaS-pocalypse real? I think it kinda is, for some businesses. A history lesson from an elder developer I think it’s worth reflecting on what the original premise for Software-as-a-Service actually was. Back in the late 90’s/early-2000’s software was extremely…
This post probably is not for you. It’s the indulgent reflections of a middling mid-life swimmer who really needs to remember to be proud of himself and, if he doesn’t write all this down, he’s likely to forget he did any of it. Highlights First swim races/events in 10 years Gaelforce Trilogy (3.5km, 3.9km, 3.9km) Garnish Island (5km) Personal bests set this year: 800m 1000m 1500m Longest open…
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I think everyone has heard that before. I was vaguely familiar with it but it’s not a particularly core part of my life. Or so I thought. I’ve been reflecting a bit on larger-scale changes which are happening around me: the major geopolitical changes we’re…
Look, I get it, you’re sick to death of hearing about AI. It’s in the news, it’s all over social media, it’s in your favourite apps, and the slop is infecting every corner of your world. You just want to go outside, touch grass, and hope the whole thing goes away. I have devastating news for you: it’s not going away. I’m not a AI-evangalist, and I’m not an AI-luddite. I’m something much more…
I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the current technology underpinning LLMs will provide a route to it. But I also think there’s something we should actually be afraid of long before AGI, if it ever comes. When talking about humans in any…
I’m attending the Rails At Scale event prior to RailsWorld in Amsterdam and attendees were asked to provide a brief piece of the challenges of using Rails “at scale” (for whatever scale means to us). I wrote a revised piece but unfortunately discovered the email to Amanda sitting in my drafts folder after the submission deadline. Duh! 🤦♂️ So, here’s my piece about the scaling challenges that…
Years ago I moved from being one of the developers of Podia to being the CTO. I went from spending ~100% of my time writing code to maybe 70% as more time was taken up managing people and projects. Over the years, that percentage has continued to drop and drop. and now I’m doing very little consistent coding—I ship small changes, occasional bug fixes, upgrades etc but I’m no longer on the critical…
This week, as everyone was trying out the latest OpenAI image generation tools and flooding their social media with them, it occurred to me: are we losing our taste? I don’t necessarily mean that AI-generated images are taste-less just that the creator isn’t really engaging with the medium anymore. You ask for a picture of your dog in a meme and you get it! But is that exactly what you wanted? Are…
If you’re building a Bridgetown site on Cloudflare Pages and encounter this error: Exception raised: Encoding::UndefinedConversionError "\xE2" from ASCII-8BIT to UTF-8 bridgetown-core-1.2.0/lib/bridgetown-core/url.rb:160:in `encode' You can spend about a day trying to track down some errant character in a filename, or title, or somewhere . You can try upgrading Bridgetown, upgrading Ruby,…